[CAnet - news] Cyber-infrastructure for business - VoIP+JAX+SOA

[Although a lot of cyber-infrastructure discussion has been about high
performance computing and petascale computing the real revolutionary
potential of cyber-infrastructure middleware is in business applications.
Here are a couple of good articles describing the potential for SOA, BPEL,
REST and AJAX to transform business and human processes as we know them
today. Some excerpts -- BSA]

http://www.pcworld.idg.com.au/index.php/id;528811841;fp;2;fpid;3

Why SOA, VOIP will converge

A dozen years ago, I wrote a Byte cover story on the subject of
computer-telephony integration. CTI was "right around the corner" back then.
Every time I revisit the subject I conclude that, regrettably, it still is.

Voice and data networking remain two different cultures that have so far
failed spectacularly to come together. 

Consider a business process that's been automated, SOA-style. A BPEL
(Business Process Execution Language) script orchestrates the flow of XML
payloads through a sequence of steps, untouched by human hands, until an
exception occurs. In all such workflows, people are the exception handlers
of last resort.

How does the process that raised the exception kick off a meeting between
the requester of a purchase order and its approver? Today the most likely
method would be to set up a call in a conference bridge and then e-mail
invitations to the two parties. But although computers are supposed to be
our intelligent assistants, an intelligent human assistant would set up the
conference call between the parties.

According to Mark Ericson, director of SOA product strategy at BlueNote
Networks, setting up that call in response to a BPEL exception is exactly
the kind of thing that BlueNote's SessionSuite SOA Edition is designed to
do.

What's intriguing about this scenario is that, as with Amazon's Mechanical
Turk, it enables a software-based service to call on the services of humans.
In the case of MTurk, an application creates a HIT (human intelligence task)
that a human worker accepts, performs, and submits.

In a world where SOA and VOIP work hand in hand, more natural scenarios
become possible. I have, for example, been dealing with a stalled purchase
order of my own for several days. The business rule says that I have to
contact two parties, who must in turn reach an agreement. But we've all been
playing voice-mail or e-mail tag, and so far we haven't managed to close the
loop. It's admittedly creepy to imagine empowering that business rule to
detect our common availability, initiate a conference call, and receive a
signal from us that tells it to proceed. But the alternative that we
constantly endure is arguably worse.

But the vision of a common framework for process-to-process,
process-to-human, and human-to-human communication is compelling.

The genius of REST (Representational State Transfer) is that it's a mode of
communication equally accessible to programs and humans. To software, a URL
is a method call. To a person, it's a bookmark that can be saved, traded,
and tagged. VOIP/SOA convergence aims for a similar kind of duality. 




http://ajax.sys-con.com/read/276358.htm



AJAX + SOA: The Next Killer App
SOA lacks a face; that's where AJAX comes in - it puts a face on SOA

	

Enterprises trying to improve business unit productivity and the reuse of IT
assets continue to struggle. IT organizations have achieved some success by
attacking these challenges with Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), but in
most cases have still only exposed small portions of the overall IT service
portfolio. 

What's been missing is an easy way to put a "face" on SOA - and that's
precisely the benefit of using AJAX in combination with SOA.


... it's the business applications that run behind the corporate firewalls
that can really exploit and benefit from AJAX, because it gives us two key
features: a client-side programming model and the ease of making
asynchronous calls to the server. These two key capabilities - the ability
to apply logic in the client (browser) and to access server data without
disrupting the Web page - are what al-low the new Web 2.0 paradigm to open
up so many enticing possibilities for rich enterprise applications.

That's where AJAX comes in - it puts a face on SOA. Think about what happens
when SOA services come online. They usually get registered in a
registry/repository (if we're lucky) and become available for consumption.
For instance, take a look at what StrikeIron (www.StrikeIron.com) provides.
StrikeIron has created a "Web services marketplace" for the general
population. At first glance, StrikeIron's catalog looks like a list of
mini-business applications. But then you realize that these aren't
applications - they're actually Web services. The concept of a company
providing WSDL/REST Web services for general consumption makes a lot of
sense.

The same approach could be taken by enterprises to begin offering their Web
services to a wider audience. Through a Web services marketplace,
enterprises could register various Web services that would normally only be
available internally and/or to their partners. The marketplace vendors would
obviously love to see this happen, but more importantly, I see this as an
opportunity to begin to apply AJAX + SOA to drive a whole new class of Web
2.0 business applications.

For the first time, it's starting to feel like our application develop-ment
and SOA efforts are coming together. We have business functionality
represented in a reusable form - SOA services. We have ubiquitous
connectivity - the Web. We have what's turning out to be the new application
container - the browser. 

I truly believe we're entering a new era with amazing opportunity. Web 2.0
social networks, photo-sharing and tagging are great, but the real corporate
impact comes in a form of Web 2.0 for the enterprise.


-----------
[email protected]
www.canarie.ca/~bstarn
skype: pocketpro
SkypeIn: +1 614 441-9603


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